Tapstrokes

I had a little discussion with a friend yesterday about how to access a function in the new iPod/iPhone OS4. I had mentioned about how I was organizing my applications into folders – actually for no reason other than I could. The question was “How do you do that?”

It actually was a good question because like a lot of things Apple, it’s not immediately intuitive. To be intuitive, there would be a menu items that says “Make a New Folder”. Not so in this case. I figure that if I get the question once, I’ll get it again so here was how I did it. I’m going to call my procedure superstitious as in “superstitious behaviour”. There may be other ways to skin this cat but this is what I did.

First, you have to get at least two items that you’d like in the same folder on the same screen.

Then, get your icons to wiggle. That’s easily done by selecting an icon and holding it down for a few seconds.

Next, drag one of the icons onto the other. This is the process that creates the folder and, once done, the OS appears to make a really good guess as to what to call the new folder. Or, you can rename it yourself….

And, voila, you’re done. The new folder appears on your desktop with thumbnails to give you a sense of what’s in there.

The folder appears as just another desktop icon. Tap to open it and then tap to launch the application.

Does anyone have another way of doing this?

Like many of these routines, it’s non-intuitive (at least to me) first, but once you discover how it’s done, it works very efficiently and effectively.